Last evening attended another lecture given at the Mercure Hotel (ex Royal Station Hotel), Hull by the President of the Hull and East Riding Astronomical Association and organised by the Hull Literary and Philosophical Association. Held in the large ground-floor room it was an excellent talk with good visuals and left one reeling at the amazing increase in knowledge about the solar system, galaxies and the Universe achieved in the 20th century. This was one of my three themes in the Rise of Rationalism W.E.A. course which finished recently – I’m afraid my presentation of this progress was a pale shadow of the one given last night.
However, my relevant biographical subject was Nikolaus Copernicus (see above). Being a gifted man from a privileged background meant he could benefit from travel to Italy as a young man and study canon-law and medicine. Sometimes erroneously described as a monk he was a sort of Papal envoy, a situation partly resulting from family ‘connections’. In middle and old age he returned to his home country in northern Poland, near the Baltic Sea coast, living mostly in Frombork and it was here that he conducted his astronomical observations from the top of the surviving medieval town walls. All his calculations and observations were gained from the use of mathematical instruments of that time, the first known telescope being invented by Galileo in the early 17th century, some 80 years later.
Being a ‘humanist’ and child of the Renaissance it is possible that Copernicus had read of ancient scholars (and medieval Arabic scholars) who had previously suggested a ‘heliocentric’ concept of the Sun’s solar system, but it is he who is credited with proving it. He also proved that planet Earth was rotating about its tilted axis one full revolution every 24 hours, while also travelling through space in orbit.
Like my other two founders of rational thought William Smith (father of modern stratigraphy) and Charles Darwin (father of evolution) Copernicus had his ideas published during his lifetime. Because his ideas challenged Biblical text there was friction with the Roman Catholic Church but what, perhaps, seems more surprising is that his ideas were vigorously condemned by Martin Luther and John Calvin, two leading figure-heads of the Protestant Revolution.